Coffey on the Mile

12

AROUND QUARTER PAST TWO in the afternoon, my friend Elaine Connelly came to me where I sat in the sunroom, with the last pages of my story squared up neatly in front of me. Her face was very pale, and there were shiny places under her eyes. I think she had been crying.

Me, I’d been looking. Just that. Looking out the window and over the hills to the east, my right hand throbbing at the end of its wrist. But it was a peaceful throb, somehow. I felt empty, husked out. A feeling that was terrible and wonderful at the same time.

It was hard to meet Elaine’s eyes—I was afraid of the hate and contempt I might see there—but they were all right. Sad and wondering, but all right. No hate, no contempt, and no disbelief.

“Do you want the rest of the story?” I asked. I tapped the little pile of script with my aching hand. “It’s here, but I’ll understand if you’d just as soon not—”

“It isn’t a question of what I want,” she said. “I have to know how it came out, although I guess there is no doubt that you executed him. The intervention of Providence-with-a-capital-P is greatly overrated in the lives of ordinary humans, I think. But before I take those pages… Paul…”

She stopped, as if unsure how to go on. I waited. Sometimes you can’t help people. Sometimes it’s better not even to try.

“Paul, you speak in here as though you had two grown children in 1932—not just one, but two. If you didn’t get married to your Janice when you were twelve and she was eleven, something like that—”

I smiled a little. “We were young when we married—a lot of hill-people are, my own mother was—but not that young.”

“Then how old are you? I’ve always assumed you were in your early eighties, my age, possibly even a little younger, but according to this…”

“I was forty the year John walked the Green Mile,” I said. “I was born in 1892. That makes me a hundred and four, unless my reckoning’s out.”

She stared at me, speechless.

I held out the rest of the manuscript, remembering again how John had touched me, there in his cell. You won’t ’splode, he’d said, smiling a bit at the very idea, and I hadn’t… but something had happened to me, all the same. Something lasting.

“Read the rest of it,” I said. “What answers I have are in there.”

“All right,” she almost whispered. “I’m a little afraid to, I can’t lie about that, but… all right. Where will you be?”

I stood up, stretched, listened to my spine crackle in my back. One thing that I knew for sure was that I was sick to death of the sunroom. “Out on the croquet course. There’s still something I want to show you, and it’s in that direction.”

“Is it… scary?” In her timid look I saw the little girl she had been back when men wore straw boaters in the summer and raccoon coats in the winter.

“No,” I said, smiling. “Not scary.”

“All right.” She took the pages. “I’m going to take these down to my room. I’ll see you out on the croquet course around…” She riffled the manuscript, estimating. “Four? Is that all right?”

“Perfect,” I said, thinking of the too-curious Brad Dolan. He would be gone by then.

She reached out, gave my arm a little squeeze, and left the room. I stood where I was for a moment, looking down at the table, taking in the fact that it was bare again except for the breakfast tray Elaine had brought me that morning, my scattered papers at last gone. I somehow couldn’t believe I was done… and as you can see, since all this was written after I recorded John Coffey’s execution and gave the last batch of pages to Elaine, I was not. And even then, part of me knew why.

Alabama.

I filched the last piece of cold toast off the tray, went downstairs, and out onto the croquet course. There I sat in the sun, watching half a dozen pairs and one slow but cheerful foursome pass by waving their mallets, thinking my old man’s thoughts and letting the sun warm my old man’s bones.

Around two-forty-five, the three-to-eleven shift started to trickle in from the parking lot, and at three, the day-shift folks left. Most were in groups, but Brad Dolan, I saw, was walking alone. That was sort of a happy sight; maybe the world hasn’t gone entirely to hell, after all. One of his joke-books was sticking out of his back pocket. The path to the parking lot goes by the croquet course, so he saw me there, but he didn’t give me either a wave or a scowl. That was fine by me. He got into his old Chevrolet with the bumper sticker reading I HAVE SEEN GOD AND HIS NAME IS NEWT. Then he was gone to wherever he goes when he isn’t here, laying a thin trail of discount motor oil behind.

Around four o’clock, Elaine joined me, just as she had promised. From the look of her eyes, she’d done a little more crying. She put her arms around me and hugged me tight. “Poor John Coffey,” she said. “And poor Paul Edgecombe, too.”

Poor Paul, I heard Jan saying. Poor old guy.

Elaine began to cry again. I held her, there on the croquet course in the late sunshine. Our shadows looked as if they were dancing. Perhaps in the Make-Believe Ballroom we used to listen to on the radio back in those days.

At last she got herself under control and drew back from me. She found a Kleenex in her blouse pocket and wiped her streaming eyes with it. “What happened to the Warden’s wife, Paul? What happened with Melly?”

“She was considered the marvel of the age, at least by the doctors at Indianola Hospital,” I said. I took her arm and we began to walk toward the path which led away from the employees’ parking lot and into the woods. Toward the shed down by the wall between Georgia Pines and the world of younger people. “She died—of a heart attack, not a brain tumor—ten or eleven years later. In forty-three, I think. Hal died of a stroke right around Pearl Harbor Day—could have been on Pearl Harbor Day, for all I remember, so she outlived him by two years. Sort of ironic.”

“And Janice?”

“I’m not quite prepared for that today,” I said. “I’ll tell you another time.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” But that was one I never kept. Three months after the day we walked down into the woods together (I would have held her hand, if I hadn’t been afraid of hurting her bunched and swollen fingers), Elaine Connelly died quietly in her bed. As with Melinda Moores, death came as the result of a heart attack. The orderly who found her said she looked peaceful, as if it had come suddenly and without much pain. I hope he was right about that. I loved Elaine. And I miss her. Her and Janice and Brutal and just all of them.

We reached the second shed on the path, the one down by the wall. It stood back in a bower of scrub pines, its sagging roof and boarded-over windows laced and dappled with shadows. I started toward it. Elaine hung back a moment, looking fearful.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Really. Come on.”

There was no latch on the door—there had been once, but it had been torn away—and so I used a folded-over square of cardboard to wedge it shut. I pulled it free now, and stepped into the shed. I left the door as wide open as it would go, because it was dark inside.

“Paul, what?… Oh. Oh!” That second “oh” was just shy of a scream.

There was a table pushed off to one side. On it was a flashlight and a brown paper bag. On the dirty floor was a Hav-A-Tampa cigar box I’d gotten from the concession man who refills the home’s soft-drink and candy machines. I’d asked him for it special, and since his company also sells tobacco products, it was easy for him to get. I offered to pay him for it—they were valuable commodities when I worked at Cold Mountain, as I may have told you—but he just laughed me off.

Peering over the edge of it were a pair of bright little oilspot eyes.

“Mr. Jingles,” I said in a low voice. “Come over here. Come on over here, old boy, and see this lady.”

I squatted down—it hurt, but I managed—and held out my hand. At first I didn’t think he was going to be able to get over the side of the box this time, but he made it with one final lunge. He landed on his side, then regained his feet, and came over to me. He ran with a hitching limp in one of his back legs; the injury that Percy had inflicted had come back in Mr. Jingles’s old age. His old, old age. Except for the top of his head and the tip of his tail, his fur had gone entirely gray.

He hopped onto the palm of my hand. I raised him up and he stretched his neck out, sniffing at my breath with his ears laid back and his tiny dark eyes avid. I held my hand out toward Elaine, who looked at the mouse with wide-eyed wonder, her lips parted.

“It can’t be,” she said, and raised her eyes to me. “Oh Paul, it isn’t… it can’t be!”

“Watch,” I said, “and then tell me that.”

From the bag on the table I took a spool which I had colored myself—not with Crayolas but with Magic Markers, an invention undreamed of in 1932. It came to the same, though. It was as bright as Del’s had been, maybe brighter. Messieurs et mesdames, I thought. Bienvenue au cirque du mousie!

I squatted again, and Mr. Jingles ran off my palm. He was old, but as obsessed as ever. From the moment I had taken the spool out of the bag, he’d had eyes for nothing else. I rolled it across the shed’s uneven, splintery floor, and he was after it at once. He didn’t run with his old speed, and his limp was painful to watch, but why should he have been either fast or surefooted? As I’ve said, he was old, a Methuselah of a mouse. Sixty-four, at least.

He reached the spool, which struck the far wall and bounced back. He went around it, then lay down on his side. Elaine started forward and I held her back. After a moment, Mr. Jingles found his feet again. Slowly, so slowly, he nosed the spool back to me. When he’d first come—I’d found him lying on the steps leading to the kitchen in just that same way, as if he’d travelled a long distance and was exhausted—he had still been able to guide the spool with his paws, as he had done all those years ago on the Green Mile. That was beyond him, now; his hindquarters would no longer support him. Yet his nose was as educated as ever. He just had to go from one end of the spool to the other to keep it on course. When he reached me, I picked him up in one hand—no more than a feather, he weighed—and the spool in the other. His bright dark eyes never left it.

“Don’t do it again, Paul,” Elaine said in a broken voice. “I can’t bear to watch him.”

I understood how she felt, but thought she was wrong to ask it. He loved chasing and fetching the spool; after all the years, he still loved it just as much. We should all be so fortunate in our passions.

“There are peppermint candies in the bag, too,” I said. “Canada Mints. I think he still likes them—he won’t stop sniffing, if I hold one out to him—but his digestion has gotten too bad to eat them. I bring him toast, instead.”

I squatted again, broke a small fragment off the piece I’d brought with me from the sunroom, and put it on the floor. Mr. Jingles sniffed at it, then picked it up in his paws and began to eat. His tail was coiled neatly around him. He finished, then looked expectantly up.

“Sometimes us old fellas can surprise you with our appetites,” I said to Elaine, and handed her the toast. “You try.”

She broke off another fragment and dropped it on the floor. Mr. Jingles approached it, sniffed, looked at Elaine… then picked it up and began to eat.

“You see?” I said. “He knows you’re not a floater.”

“Where did he come from, Paul?”

“Haven’t a clue. One day when I went out for my early-morning walk, he was just here, lying on the kitchen steps. I knew who he was right away, but I got a spool out of the laundry room occasional basket just to be sure. And I got him a cigar box. Lined it with the softest stuff I could find. He’s like us, Ellie, I think—most days just one big sore place. Still, he hasn’t lost all his zest for living. He still likes his spool, and he still likes a visit from his old blockmate. Sixty years I held the story of John Coffey inside me, sixty and more, and now I’ve told it. I kind of had the idea that’s why he came back. To let me know I should hurry up and do it while there was still time. Because I’m like him—getting there.”

“Getting where?”

“Oh, you know,” I said, and we watched Mr. Jingles for awhile in silence. Then, for no reason I could tell you, I tossed the spool again, even though Elaine had asked me not to. Maybe only because, in a way, him chasing a spool was like old people having their slow and careful version of sex—you might not want to watch it, you who are young and convinced that, when it comes to old age, an exception will be made in your case, but they still want to do it.

Mr. Jingles set off after the rolling spool again, clearly with pain, and just as clearly (to me, at least) with all his old, obsessive enjoyment.

“Ivy-glass windows,” she whispered, watching him go.

“Ivy-glass windows,” I agreed, smiling.

“John Coffey touched the mouse the way he touched you. He didn’t just make you better of what was wrong with you then, he made you… what, resistant?”

“That’s as good a word as any, I think.”

“Resistant to the things that eventually bring the rest of us down like trees with termites in them. You… and him. Mr. Jingles. When he cupped Mr. Jingles in his hands.”

“That’s right. Whatever power worked through John did that—that’s what I think, anyway—and now it’s finally wearing off. The termites have chewed their way through our bark. It took a little longer than it does ordinarily, but they got there. I may have a few more years, men still live longer than mice, I guess, but Mr. Jingles’s time is just about up.”

He reached the spool, limped around it, fell over on his side, breathing rapidly (we could see his respiration moving through his gray fur like ripples), then got up and began to push it gamely back with his nose. His fur was gray, his gait was unsteady, but the oilspots that were his eyes gleamed as brightly as ever.

“You think he wanted you to write what you have written,” she said. “Is that so, Paul?”

“Not Mr. Jingles,” I said. “Not him but the force that—”

“Why, Paulie! And Elaine Connelly, too!” a voice cried from the open door. It was loaded with a kind of satiric horror. “As I live and breathe! What in the goodness can you two be doing here?”

I turned, not at all surprised to see Brad Dolan there in the doorway. He was grinning as a man only does when he feels he’s fooled you right good and proper. How far down the road had he driven after his shift was over? Maybe only as far as The Wrangler, for a beer or two and maybe a lap-dance before coming back.

“Get out,” Elaine said coldly. “Get out right now.”

“Don’t you tell me to get out, you wrinkledy old bitch,” he said, still smiling. “Maybe you can tell me that up the hill, but you ain’t up the hill now. This ain’t where you’re supposed to be. This is off-limits. Little love-nest, Paulie? Is that what you got here? Kind of a Playboy pad for the geriatric…” His eyes widened as he at last saw the shed’s tenant. “What the fuck?”

I didn’t turn to look. I knew what was there, for one thing; for another, the past had suddenly doubled over the present, making one terrible image, three-dimensional in its reality. It wasn’t Brad Dolan standing there in the doorway but Percy Wetmore. In another moment he would rush into the shed and crush Mr. Jingles (who no longer had a hope of outrunning him) under his shoe. And this time there was no John Coffey to bring him back from the edge of death. Any more than there had been a John Coffey when I needed him on that rainy day in Alabama.

I got to my feet, not feeling any ache in my joints or muscles this time, and rushed toward Dolan. “Leave him alone!” I yelled. “You leave him alone, Percy, or by God I’ll—”

“Who you callin Percy?” he asked, and pushed me back so hard I almost fell over. Elaine grabbed me, although it must have hurt her to do so, and steadied me. “Ain’t the first time you done it, either. And stop peein in your pants. I ain’t gonna touch im. Don’t need to. That’s one dead rodent.”

I turned, thinking that Mr. Jingles was only lying on his side to catch his breath, the way he sometimes did. He was on his side, all right, but that rippling motion through his fur had stopped. I tried to convince myself that I could still see it, and then Elaine burst into loud sobs. She bent painfully, and picked up the mouse I had first seen on the Green Mile, coming up to the duty desk as fearlessly as a man approaching his peers… or his friends. He lay limp on her hand. His eyes were dull and still. He was dead.

Dolan grinned unpleasantly, revealing teeth which had had very little acquaintance with a dentist. “Aw, sakes, now!” he said. “Did we just lose the family pet? Should we have a little funeral, with paper flowers and—”

“SHUT UP!” Elaine screamed at him, so loudly and so powerfully that he backed away a step, the smile slipping off his face. “GET OUT OF HERE! GET OUT OR YOU’LL NEVER WORK ANOTHER DAY HERE! NOT ANOTHER HOUR! I SWEAR IT!”

“You won’t be able to get so much as a slice of bread on a breadline,” I said, but so low neither of them heard me. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mr. Jingles, lying on Elaine’s palm like the world’s smallest bearskin rug.

Brad thought about coming back at her, calling her bluff—he was right, the shed wasn’t exactly approved territory for the Georgia Pines inmates, even I knew that much—and then didn’t. He was, at heart, a coward, just like Percy. And he might have checked on her claim that her grandson was Somebody Important and had discovered it was a true claim. Most of all, perhaps, his curiosity had been satisfied, his thirst to know slaked. And after all his wondering, the mystery had turned out not to be such of a much. An old man’s pet mouse had apparently been living in the shed. Now it had croaked, had a heart attack or something while pushing a colored spool.

“Don’t know why you’re getting so het up,” he said. “Either of you. You act like it was a dog, or something.”

“Get out,” she spat. “Get out, you ignorant man. What little mind you have is ugly and misdirected.”

He flushed dully, the spots where his high school pimples had been filling in a darker red. There had been a lot of them, by the look. “I’ll go,” he said, “but when you come down here tomorrow… Paulie… you’re going to find a new lock on this door. This place is off-limits to the residents, no matter what bad-tempered things old Mrs. My Shit Don’t Stink has to say about me. Look at the floor! Boards all warped and rotted! If you was to go through, your scrawny old leg’d be apt to snap like a piece of kindling. So just take that dead mouse, if you want it, and get gone. The Love Shack is hereby closed.”

He turned and strode away, looking like a man who believes he’s earned at least a draw. I waited until he was gone, and then gently took Mr. Jingles from Elaine. My eyes happened on the bag with the peppermint candies in it, and that did it—the tears began to come. I don’t know, I just cry easier somehow these days.

“Would you help me to bury an old friend?” I asked Elaine when Brad Dolan’s heavy footsteps had faded away.

“Yes, Paul.” She put her arm around my waist and laid her head against my shoulder. With one old and twisted finger, she stroked Mr. Jingles’s moveless side. “I would be happy to do that.”

And so we borrowed a trowel from the gardening shed and we buried Del’s pet mouse as the afternoon shadows drew long through the trees, and then we walked back to get our supper and take up what remained of our lives. And it was Del I found myself thinking of, Del kneeling on the green carpet of my office with his hands folded and his bald pate gleaming in the lamplight, Del who had asked us to take care of Mr. Jingles, to make sure the bad ’un wouldn’t hurt him anymore. Except the bad ’un hurts us all in the end, doesn’t he?

“Paul?” Elaine asked. Her voice was both kind and exhausted. Even digging a grave with a trowel and laying a mouse to rest in it is a lot of excitement for old sweeties like us, I guess. “Are you all right?”

My arm was around her waist. I squeezed it. “I’m fine,” I said.

“Look,” she said. “It’s going to be a beautiful sunset. Shall we stay out and watch it?”

“All right,” I said, and we stayed there on the lawn for quite awhile, arms around each other’s waists, first watching the bright colors come up in the sky, then watching them fade to ashes of gray.

Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de nôtre mort.

Amen.